News Wrapup: 13/5/17

Remedy Entertainment, developers of the 2010 action horror game, have announced that Alan Wake will no longer be on digital stores as of May 15th 10am PST. This is because of a music license agreement expiring and not being renewed. Anyone who already owns the game will still have it playable in their library and Remedy ensures everyone that only the original will be affected, not Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.

From now until the game is removed, Alan Wake, all of its DLC, and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare will be 90% off on Steam.

Opinion: It’s sad to see this sort of thing happen but at least it shouldn’t be too hard to find a physical console version of the game in the future. I remember when the Marvel vs Capcom games were met with a similar fate and I still regret not picking up the Xbox Live Arcade version of Marvel vs Capcom 2 before it was removed. If you have even the slightest interest in Alan Wake you should definitely pick it up on Steam while you still can, or you might regret it in the future.

Binding of Isaac developer adds fan made mods into the official game and teases new IP.

Since the release of the Afterbirth+ expansion for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, creator Edmund Mcmillen has been adamant about supporting the modding scene for the game. The expansion brought us mod tools and a Steam Workshop page to easily add mods to your game. Additionally, they have been adding some of these mods into the game as permanent features. The mods include new items like Telepathy, which allows you to catch and launch back enemy”s attacks, new visuals like Bomb Stacking, which shows a better representation of which upgrades your bombs have, and the Dressing Table, which allows you to change your appearance. The full post and details of these mods can be viewed here.

At the end of the post he also briefly talks about a new project that he’s been working on, saying that:

“its hard, its weird, its personal, its has amazing controls, its a totally new unannounced IP and its easily one of the largest games ive ever made level wise.”

Opinion: For a while I was really into Isaac and even got all of the achievements in Rebirth and Afterbirth. I didn’t get into Afterbirth+ as much as I wanted to, mainly because I felt like it just made the game harder and not more fun, but with these mods coming in I’ll definitely be coming back to the game in the future.

As for the new IP, I’m excited to see what they come up with and the talk of amazing controls makes me think that the game will follow the uniqueness of their previous work.

Halo 6 will be missing from E3 this year.

The 343 Industries’ community manager Brian Jarrard, who also goes by ske7ch343, has taken to reddit to make the announcement. In a thread discussing their most recent community update, he crushed the dreams of the Halo community (something that 343 has been doing since Halo 4) that their E3 announcement will be unrelated to Halo 6. We’ve heard that work on Halo 6 has started as early as a year ago but, apart from some specific details, we don’t know much about the game yet.

The other news may have something to do with Halo 3, as its 10th anniversary (the amount of time between the originals and remakes of the first two) is September 25th, this year. However, it seems unlikely that they would do a full remake of a game from the last generation, especially seeing as the abysmal Master Chief Collection only came out in 2014. It could also be about the recently released Halo Wars 2 or the future of Halo’s competitive scene.

Opinion: I used to be an insanely hardcore Halo fan but, starting with Reach, my love of the series slowly faded away. Besides their tournament scene, I don’t think that 343 have done a single thing right with the series. Halo 4 had terrible multiplayer, The Master Chief Collection was a broken mess, and Halo 5 was missing classic features in a campaign that was laughable at best. It would take some serious changes for me to be interested in this series again.

Quake Champions giving out beta keys to everyone.

It appears that Bethesda and id Software are giving away keys to everyone who signs up for one here. The beta will be open from now until May 21st.

Be sure to check back here for my thoughts on the game once I’ve put some time into the beta.